Jon Stewart Lampoons Media on Palin Email Frenzy

Jon Stewart roundly scolded the media’s feeding frenzy over the release of 24,000 pages of former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails. The reportorial excess also confirmed Palin’s staunchest criticisms of what she denounces as the “lamestream media,” Stewart said Monday on “The Daily Show.”

“Why are you wasting our time?” the comedian/political satirist/media critic admonished the networks, newspapers, and pundits for their slathering predictions.

The emails, tracing just to Palin’s governorship and not including her tenure as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in 2008 or time since, were released because of a media Freedom of Information Act request.

With a sense of irony, Stewart's rant starts off as if it will be a riff against Palin, and then morphs into its revelation that the media should think twice about throwing stones.

Stewart showed a montage of media clips in which journalists breathlessly predicted what deep, dark secrets the emails would unveil, and their later acknowledgements that emails actually covered pretty mundane topics.

They included Palin deciding whether to appear in a fitness magazine, a constituent concerned about her son Trig’s car seat, and daughter Willow arranging a play date.

“As the day wore on . . . the desperation began to show,” Stewart said.

He summed up the day of email digging with a clip of a CNN desk reporter’s question to a correspondent: “Is this trivial stuff or monumental or something in between?”

“That wasn’t even a question,” Stewart said. “It was like some bizarre existential riddle."